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The information assembled here is for any campaign in any party. It was designed to give you simple, actionable information that will make your campaign’s information more secure from adversaries trying to attack your organization—and our democracy

This report recommends policies and actions to improve the return on investment the U.S. government makes in sponsoring research and development (R&D) at the Department of Energy's (DOE) seventeen National Laboratories ("Labs"). While the Labs make a unique and significant contribution to all of the Department of Energy's missions, the authors develop the idea that for the Labs to fully support DOE's energy transformation goals, their R&D management practices need to be updated to better reflect current research into innovation systems and management. They also highlight the necessity of Lab interactions with industry in order to impact the nation's energy infrastructure investment, which is, for the most part, privately held.

Xi is now not only the most powerful leader of China since Mao. He is also the most ambitious leader of any country today. In the past five years, he has proved himself the most effective in advancing his nation’s position in the world. And among all of the competitors on the international stage, he is the most likely to leave a lasting mark on history.

Every day more than 1 million packages reach the United States through the global postal system without the important security information law enforcement agencies need to stop and inspect packages that could contain deadly drugs and other illicit items. Given that a recent Customs and Border Protection operation at the postal service’s international hub at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport found 43 percent of foreign packages were noncompliant with U.S. regulations, the magnitude of this issue is especially troubling.

Newsletter Article
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Jeh Johnson, a Senior Fellow with the Belfer Center, was Secretary of Homeland Security from December 2013 to January 2017. Johnson is currently a partner with the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP. As Secretary of Homeland Security, Johnson was responsible for the TSA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration, U.S. Citizenship Services, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and FEMA. Here, Juliette Kayyem, Director of the Belfer Center’s Homeland Security Project, asks Secretary Johnson about his experience at DHS.

"Our national security policy should focus on making it harder for terrorists to arm themselves — doing so increases the likelihood that attacks of all kinds might be thwarted or exposed. This shooter terrorized, period. In what is sure to be ongoing investigations into what triggered him — as if something as evil as this can ever be fully explained — we risk minimizing the critical facet of his motivation: that he had access to weaponry that could kill this many people so quickly."

"A good man who has empathy, or even knows how to pretend to have it, would not make the unfolding tragedy about himself. A confident President would not accuse Puerto Ricans of wanting 'everything done for them.' A self-reflective leader able to critically assess would question and push his team to send more resources and get the federal response moving. A strong Commander-in-Chief would know that his main duty is not to praise himself or lash back because of a bruised ego, but to use his global platform to provide two key needs: numbers (responders, commodities, ships, food, water, debris removal, etc) and hope."

"Hurricane Harvey is destined to be the first major homeland security and emergency management crisis the Trump administration has faced. And, ironically, it is at this moment that President Donald Trump will be judged on how well he lets a bureaucracy he so often maligns or denigrates actually do its job."

"Donald Trump is already enabling Russia with his lack of action. He doesn't even affirm the assessment by our intelligence agencies that Russia disrupted our elections; in statements, he still caveats the possibility that Russia did it with asides that it could have been others. He appears not to have challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin in any meaningful way when they met at the G20. States and localities have not been given any advice about how to protect their election systems going forward."

"The measure of success in counterterrorism efforts is not simply whether an attack occurred or not. Another measure must be whether fewer people died or were harmed because of the actions of police, fire fighters, emergency managers, public health officials and the voluntary efforts of the public."

"No parent is thinking about raising fearless kids right now. Their kids will be tied to them by their metaphoric leashes for the foreseeable future. That's the real power of this attack: not only are the victims so particularly undeserving, they are also among the most vulnerable in the immediate aftermath when terror like this strikes."

"I've never met Clarke, but based on his inflammatory rhetoric, along with the cloud hanging over his tenure in Milwaukee, I'll just come right out and say it: He’s not fit to serve at the agency tasked with domestic security for all Americans."

"It is that assault on our norms, processes and constitutional order that make the week we just had so historic. How extraordinary? Clapper began that week testifying the enemy was Russia. He ended it, unwittingly it seemed, by telling us that the enemy was also within."